On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 1:31 PM Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On 19/08/2025 16.39, Gustavo Romero wrote: > > The goal of this series is to remove Avocado as a dependency for running > > the reverse_debugging functional test. > > > > This test, the last one I’m aware of that relies on Avocado, requires it > > because of the need for GDB to test reverse stepping and continue. > > Hi! > > Please note that there are currently also some efforts going on to extract > the GDB part from avocado into a more self-contained python module called > aautils, which might help here, too: > > https://github.com/avocado-framework/aautils/issues/82 >
There's also https://github.com/cs01/pygdbmi which I have used before, it seems like it does the same thing as avocado's gdb module but it could be missing some functionality > > In this series, we leveraged the run-test.py script used in the > > check-tcg tests, making it a GDB runner capable of calling a test script > > without spawning any VMs. In this configuration, the test script can > > manage the VMs and also import gdb from the test script, making the > > Python GDB API available inside the functional test. > > > > The test is kept “skipped” for aarch64, ppc64, and x86_64, so it is > > necessary to set QEMU_TEST_FLAKY_TESTS=1 in the test environment to > > effectively run the test on these archs. > > > > On aarch64, the test is flaky, but there is a fix that I’ve tested while > > writing this series [0] that resolves it. On ppc64 and x86_64, the test > > always fails: on ppc64, GDB gets a bogus PC, and on x86_64, the last > > part of the test (reverse-continue) does not hit the last executed PC > > (as it should) but instead jumps to the beginning of the code (fist PC > > in forward order). > > At least the x86 test used to work for me most of the time, it just fails > occasionally. Same for the ppc64 test if I disable the powernv subtest there. > > > Thus, to run the reverse_debugging test effectively on aarch64: > > > > $ export QEMU_TEST_FLAKY_TESTS=1 > > $ make check-functional > > I gave it a try, but this did not work for me, the test was not run at all > anymore. Are there any patches needed on top? > > Anyway, shifting to a different test harness here makes me wonder whether > the whole reverse_debug test should maybe be rather moved to tests/tcg > instead, where we already have the basic support for the stuff from > tests/guest-debug/ ? > The aarch64 would require a different guest payload, of course, in that > case, so not sure whether it's feasible? > > Thomas > >
